Inside Out Dorset Festival: The Alternative Tour

Yesterday I was putting the finishing touches on The Alternative Tour for Inside Out Festival. The day began with some last minute editing to get the timings precise for the audio tour element. This is modestly ambitious in that I have tried to avoid some of the things that I have often been annoyed by when taking audio tours. 

The principal one of these annoyances is the structure of most audio tours whereby you look at the map, walk to number 1, press play and listen. When that's finished you look at the map, go to number 2, press play and so on. I instead made this tour continuous so that you it walks with the listener throughout, both giving the guiding directions and the commentary. This way makes for a shorter, more intensive sort of audio tour. It does however take quite some work to get there.

This is the slightly glazed look I had when done with the recording and editing. The village  was empty then and has since been transformed by the festival infrastructure; there is some serious event management going on. One part of me would prefer to see the place in a quieter way but I know that if you have 2000 people coming, you need to be able to deal with them, and their cars, which now swell fields designated as temporary parking spaces.

I am on a three performance a day schedule, which is pretty heavy, particularly as the tour is a little longer than anticipated, even though it only uses nine locations. It covers Nelson, 1983, The Tour de Manche, lost Danish students, an alcoholic cricket team, an electric bike tour, stones circles, the Parish book, genealogy and magic mushrooms! Not bad for 40 minutes.

I did manage to see some of the other work in the festival such this giant hare. It is very nice to see it transform as you approach it from the side. At first it is an abstract shape but as the position shifts it comes into focus and reveals itself fully. Nice. There's plenty more going on too, so if you are in Dorset do pop down this weekend.

The Out of Date Tour: how the landscape is not as timeless as it may seem

After having spent the last 5 months in Beijing, working on a tour in rural Dorset is quite a change of gear. One thing that is quite certain, my lungs are appreciating the fresh air, I don't think I knew what fresh air was until I went to Beijing and got a good chance to experience its lack.

The cricket pitch was being used this time round so I talked to the batting team to find out about cricket tours. Unfortunately they were the home team, it was the fielding team who were the visitors coming from 'up North'. The pitch is quite idyllic, indeed it has been famously painted by David Inshaw. 

I realised the church deserved greater attention than I had previously given it and so I started in the church yard with the stones which are said to be on a ley line, at least that is the story I get from a book on Dorset stones and Earth Mysteries that finds significance in every stone.

The visitor's book proved to be very interesting as it is a record of people's visits to the village. Some come to remember a lost relative, other to discover one: there was a note from a Canadian family looking for their roots. I noticed a pilgrimage thrown in there too: a  bike ride to Canterbury. I remember making long bike rides before and doing so with a very different frame of reference, such as a trip from London to Sizewell nuclear power station on the Suffolk coast. I could try and call it a nuclear pilgrimage but I would be stretching a point as I basically wanted to ride and was looking for a destination to give the trip a sense of purpose. It is also good to remember that not all pilgrimages are deep spiritual experiences, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales reads as a more worldly holiday with a light religious packaging. 

My favourite entry was from one of the cricketer's who must have popping in while visiting the village for a match. I actually saw the team and so could understand his visit.

I then set off on a walk that I found in a 1983 guidebook to South Dorset. The book's directions got me going out of the village but the walk took an unexpected turn when I came across a couple of Danish students who had lost their way and were looking for the South Dorset Ridgeway (SDR). I was heading that way so could guide them and at the same time ask them all about their trip and how they ended up in Littlebredy. It seems as if it was a mistake that brought them there. They had been given a lift from a motorist and were dropped off not on the coast path but nearer the inland route (SDR). Following my out of date guidebook, I too would get lost as the signs were decayed and information out of date. Fortunately I had a proper map, too, that got us out of the village and them to the their path.

After many questions about their trip, I put them on the path and took a highly circuitous route to these stones. The guidebook was interesting in that it was written as if there was a set route but then the writer said that he could not find it so took an alternative. His route was therefore already somewhat improvised back in 1983; mine much more so 30 years later. Not finding a direct path to these stones added hours to my journey. Arriving was an anti-climax as there was little to see, though I later read in my book on Earth Mysteries, there is rumoured to have been concealed, within the burial mound, a solid gold coffin.

The route then took me to the next stone circle that is flat but nonetheless clearly laid out. I'm currently reading a book that suggests these stones have a site-memory and may be instrumental in saving the planet at a future point in time. I find that a little hard to swallow, but then again, my experience was coloured by having to climb over barbed wire fence to approach them as my guidebook was so vague and out of date. The fact that the book was obsolete was at first frustrating, but I have come to see potential in this as it leaves a gap between what is described and what is seen and in the gap something interesting can happen.

Also on my mind as I was tramping up and down was the state of my feet. I have been taking a Chinese remedy to burn off a wart on my toe, the red patch in the picture. It seems to be working but it is a slow and grizzly process that doesn't combine well with camping and hiking. Still, fixing my feet seems like an important thing to do and I was very happy to discover a specialist foot clinic just before I left Beijing that said they could remove the growth. Quiet and undercover, these things remain significant in how I experience a place, that's why they are not quiet and undercover here on the blog. A challenge for me in constructing a route for Littlebredy will be introduce a wart like element, as all the existing dimensions are really quite attractive. That is not to say I want to see problems where they don't exist, but rather, that there must be some depth to the work and hidden processes that can be made visible through constructing a tour.

Tours On Demand

The Beijing Tour of All Tours is now being given as a performance on demand, that's to say it is available for private groups in much the same way as guided tours of the Chinese capital are. If you are interested contact me via the website www.billaitchison.co.uk. The tour on demand will be available until July so if you are interested get in touch sooner rather than later.

There is also a rather well written article on the performance and its research in the current Time Out Beijing. It is reproduced in full below.  

The Littlebredy Tour

Little Bredy or Littlebredy, the village gets spelt both ways, is indeed little. It's a village in South Dorset that I was shown around in preparation for the arts festival Inside Out that will be held there next September. I shall be constructing a tour for the festival which takes the South Dorset Ridgeway as its frame and Littlebredy as its focus. 

The day began in the village hall with talks about the area and an opportunity to meet the other artists. We assembled outside later in the afternoon to take a walking tour.

This tour led us past a number of points that the artists had selected to site their work in. Here for example is one of the artists with a plan of the landscape artwork she will create showing it to us and describing how it will sit upon the side of the hill. 

There was no precise tour guide leading this walk so there was no group commentary but instead a straggle of artists following a route that had been more or less decided in advance. The leader at the front of the group changed from time to time but was always one of the festival team who knew the route. As there was no ongoing commentary it was far more a chance to walk around the village and ridgeway and talk with the other artists. The going underfoot became increasingly muddy as it had been raining recently. There was much sidestepping of puddles.

We encountered our first real obstacle with a series of gates, this being one of them. We had to clamber over them but when it came to the dog in our group this variously meant coaxing it to squat under the gate or lifting it up and passing it over the gate. Undignified.

We then met the livestock. They took us for intruders and a showdown ensued. After a few nervous advances they scattered and let us pass. This was one of those moments that divided the group into those of us familiar with animals and farms and those of us more familiar with the Coffee Republic and city life.

We then came to an impasse by a farm at the bottom of a hill. There ensued much consultation of maps and smart phones, which started failing as we drove deeper into the folds of the South Dorset Ridgeway. Finally we had to ask the farmer.

Our path was an unlikely overgrown one that passed beside the cow shed. They eyed us keenly, they don't get many walkers coming this way.

And where you have cows you have cow slurry. Our path passed directly through several ankle deep, hold-your-nose stretches of manure and mud. There was no alternative but stoically soldiering on and hopping that it did not get any deeper.  

We reached an abandoned chapel in the woods some distance from Littlebedy as the light was failing. Later than expected with the night closing in we took it in and made an exit for the road which seemed to be some distance still.

By the time we reached the road it was a dark and not long after a taxi arrived to whisk us through the winding roads back to the village. This ended the first day and first part of the village tour but there was more to follow the next day.

As I had expressed an interest in tours I was offered a tour around the village's visitor attraction, The Walled Garden. I was joined by some of the artists and our guide was both responsible for maintaining the garden and showing people around so she knew the place very well.

She told us that various people visited the garden such as ramblers and horticultural societies from as far away as Somerset. I asked her if she could offer her standard visitor tour so I could get a sense of it and she agreed however as we started looking around I realised that what I was experiencing was something quite different. The artists were asking about the buildings and looking inside in order to see if they might be useful locations to site artworks and events in. Our guide was obliging and shared what she knew about the places and I realised that I was not on a normal visitor's tour but was instead getting a different sort of tour: the artist's site visit tour. Once I realised this was what was happening I relaxed more into it and took it for what it was rather than wishing it to be a different sort of tour.

With a storm forecast for the next day there were preparations afoot to limit possible damage to the garden by taking down temporary structures such as this gazebo. The approaching storm was a bit of a conversation topic in general over the weekend as it was being talked up as if it was going to be a devastating hurricane when in fact it turned out to be far less.  

Perhaps as a nod to our curiosity and the nature of the group we were treated to the ghost story. While our guide acknowledged she was not a believer in the ghost she did not disappoint us by omitting the fact that a ghost was said to haunt the garden. Coming on the back of the Haunted Holborn Tour I'm starting to see a strange connection between ghosts and tourism. This will have to be investigated a whole lot more. 

Overall then, this was a very relaxed and informative introduction to the village for what will be a new commission for The Tour of All Tours. I'll be returning here next year to develop the project and have many ideas of tours to reference. As it is not a saturated site I will have to be creative and this may in fact mean the work refers out into the society more than it might do in a place where there is an overwhelming amount of tours already in place. The festival will take place in September next year, details and updates will stream in before then.